Category: Blogging and writing

November was a moderately productive month with a smattering of posts that we reckon stood out as a bit better than usual, plus all the side orders dished up on Facebook and Twitter. (Do give us a like/follow.)

A quick side note: December being the month of lists, round-ups and predictions, we’re going to be putting together a Golden Pints piece as usual but, this time, it’s going in our email newsletter rather than on the blog. Sign up if you’re interested in knowing which was our favourite crown cap design (UK) and to find out who gets the award for best use of grapefruit juice. But now, back to business.

Here’s everything we wrote in the last month, from pondering on unfined beer to deathtrap breweries.

We started off with an attempt to decipher what the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) was trying to achieve by including an essay on unfined beer in the latest edition of the Good Beer Guide:

The real point was intended to be, we think, that (a) CAMRA knows about this stuff on the outer fringes of ‘craft beer’; (b) it acknowledges that good beer can be made this made way; and (c) it is watching with keen interest and an open attitude.

People used to enjoy spitting in pubs, and the pubs were fine with it. The young barmaids charged with cleaning up after them? Not so much.

Tandleman shared some glorious images of 1960s pub makeovers which prompted us to conjur up some colour swatches — what colour should a pub be?

A couple of years ago Durham Brewery was all the rage thanks in part, it seemed to us, to a certain generosity with samples for bloggers, Tweeters and raters. We had a few of their beers here and there and found that they ranged from decent (White Stout) to shoddy. So we were pleased at the opportunity to give them another go although our hopes weren’t high.

Yow dow av to go deep, or far, for Desi in the Black Country. No, not at all. Yow only av to scratch the surface to find one of the many delightful Desi pubs that are scattered, like precious Punjabi jewels, across ower industrial heartland… Precious indeed they are, for often – under the clever custodianship of Asian landlords – they have been injected with new life and saved from that fate worse than death: decline, abandonment and redevelopment (usually as something unhelpful, like yet another supermarket).

Ah, So Very British™ — saying things are Fine when you really mean they’re awful.

Except that’s not what we mean.

When we say Fine, we mean Fine — that is, adequate, the mildest form of Good.

And you know what? We drink a fair bit of beer that isn’t Fine. It’s not Awful or Dreadful — it’s just, like most stuff, floating around in the middle, stirring little beyond a shrug, an appreciative nod or a momentary frown.

We like to keep something back for the gold medal beers, and for the absolute stinkers.

If you want to get your brand name on the radar don’t send samples to bloggers, send them to RateBeerians.

The flurry of high rankings that followed that summer gathering—most awarding 18, 19 or 20 out of 20 and accompanied by profuse thanks to ‘Chris_O’—put the beer into the Top 50 chart. That might have been a blip except those events brought it to the attention of Edinburgh beer lover Craig Garvie. He is an enthusiastic character often to be seen at beer festival in a colourful bowler hat, steampunk shades and with his beard dyed one shade or another. A particular fan of strong stouts, he knew he had to get his hands on GKHSR.

We were prompted to research and write that piece because we, despite paying fairly close attention to British beer, had never heard of Old Chimney’s brewery or come across any of their beers on sale anywhere, ever.

On a related note, we were pondering writing something longer in response to this Tweet…

So basically what comes first the beer or the marketing?…. god i wanted to throw up typing that…

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We’re Boak and Bailey

We're geeks in general, but especially about beer and pubs. We write under the names Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey. We live in Cornwall in the UK. We've been blogging about beer since 2007. Email: contact@boakandbailey.com

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